I see pictures and hear stories of aircraft struggling back to base with hundreds of bullet holes or missing engines/parts of wings or shrapnel inside the wings. How did they stay in the air after all that anti air fire and why are modern aircraft weaker than them (Iran shot down one easily)?
In: Engineering
Bombers are hard to shoot down because they’re designed to be. Their wings give them more lift than they need, so they can still fly with holes in their wings. Their engines give them more power than they need, so they can still fly with a destroyed engine. And so on.
The tradeoff is that they’re big, heavy, slow, and consume a lot of fuel.
Modern commercial airliners like the one Iran shot down aren’t built for durability. They’re built to use the least amount of fuel possible (to keep ticket prices low), so redundancies like having extra engine power would just be a waste.
There are modern aircraft that are just as hard or harder to shoot down than WWII bombers: things like attack helicopters or the A-10 Warthog are armored and extremely durable. But you’d never want to take a passenger flight in one of them.
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